Thomas Buechler

Thomas Buechler

My very first trip abroad was by bike to Luino on the Italian side of the Lago Maggiore, followed by a month long trip of Western Europe with the infamous Interrail trainticket from Rovaniemi near the Polar Circle to France and Spain. In September 1980 I started the first trip outside of Europe, from Weggis in Switzerland all the way by train to Beijing, via Austria, the Czech Republic at that time still Czeckoslovakia, Poland, the Soviet Union, plus an endless journey across Siberia, passing quite a few birch trees on the way, but had also some interesting stops in Novosibirsk and Irkutsk, and on Lake Baikal. We finally arrived in Beijing with a 48 hours delay. Visited the Peoples Republic of China with a Friendship Tour Group that made it possible to visit factories, collective farms, hospitals and schools that were otherwise off limitis to tourists. China at that time was a model country for the Third World and how to create a new socialist world, and we enjoyed this educational trip in the good care of Miss Mao, our lovely tour guide! Hongkong was the exit point and came as a sheer surprise with its flashing neonlights and capitalist market economy in sharp contrast of what we have just seen in the Motherland!No more railway connections available, we moved on to the Philippines by plane, and met there in Manila a Swiss professor who was kind enough to show us around; we discovered places like Vigan, Camiguin Island, Cebu and Boracay with its pristine white sand, without knowing that these islands would play an important role in my future life. I was so impressed by the hospitable, lovely and entertaining nature of the Filipinos, that later on I decided to come back and make this place of 7107 islands my country of choice .But for now I had to move on, and I remember that on the day the Pope landed in Manila, I flew to Kota Kinabalu in Sabah, then visits to Kuching, Singapore, the Perenthian Islands in Malaysia etc. Moved on to Bangkok with its hot nightlife, then 7 days in Myanmar, enought to see Pagan and Mandalay, that was March 1981.Then we had our 300 dollars Biman Ticket and demanded all the stopovers possible en route to Amsterdam, and that was Rangoon, Dacca and Bombay.
In Bangladesh I rembember that we attended the celebrations of the 10th anniversary of Independance, on 26th March 1981, Yassar Arafat was there as guest of Honour, I made lots of photos of the presidential baldaquin, and upon returning to Switzerland a few days later found out that the Bengali president, Ziaur Rahman, was assasinated, suddenly my pictures became interesting for the newspapers..and I entered the world of journalism! Was assigned in La Valetta, Malta to write about this tiny nation's interesting first move on tourism development. Articles about its economy and China's growing influence on this strategically important island followed .Libya was also a major player there and supplied its neighbour Malta with cheap oil.1981 when the first snow came, I moved back to the Philippines where I found work in the tourism industry as manager of a lovely beach resort, then as tour guide for a Swiss travel agency.But with Marcos in his final years, the People's Power revolution, and the political uncertainty, tourism dropped a lot and I was jobless.But not for long.The Philippines with its long shoreline and endless beaches, its dense Rainforests and countless Coconuttrees has an huge amount of natural material, ideal for the production of Fashion jewelry.And thats exacly what I started to do, I designed my first collections, joined international trade fairs in Hongkong, Singapore, Tokyo, Seoul, Bangkok, Milan and Paris, and contacted wholesellers and Chainstores in many countries all over the world.
In this capacity, I visited in the 1980' and 1990' Australia, Fiji, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea,
Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Canada, the USA, some Carribean Islands, France, Spain, Germany, Greece, Turkey, Portugal, the Benelux countries, Scandinavia, Austria, Hungary and some more.
But that was not the end. When I had 60 countries ticked off, it became a target to visit each single country on this planet at least once, and I was working hard to achieve it. Countless overland trips to Africa, South America, and Oceania followed .Real highlights were the 1000km journey from Lhasa to Kathmandu, the railway trip from Dakar in Senegal to Bamako in Mali and the Pays Dogon excursion, visits of different tribes in the Omo valley in southern Ethiopia and collective taxi trips across Madagascar, as well as an overland trip from Cairo to Khartoum along Lake Nasser, the train trip from Yaounde in Cameron to the border with Chad, then the 16000km by public bus from Ushuaia in Argentina to Caracas in Venezuela and a Beijing to Bangkok trip overland across China, Vietnam and Cambodia.I have spent so many hours, days and even months in buses that I might be one of the most travelled bus passengers in the world .
There are 193 UN countries, and I have travelled so far to 192. Plus 3 states that are not member of the UN, the Vatican, Kosovo and Taiwan.Plus 2 countries that dont exist any longer, the German Democratic Republic and the former Socialist Democratic Republic of Yemen. I am just lacking now Namibia that I plan to visit in 2016 together with a group of close friends
to celebrate the event in Africa, the continent that has the highest number of independant countries, 54.
Another task in my bucket list is visiting Unesco world heritage sites where I am currently among the top 5 on the list of
www.worldheritagesite.org. 2015 I have so far been to more than 50 Unesco sites, and 111 regions of the TBT masterlist, about 60 of them for the very first time!